Lehigh and Rice universities have launched the Consortium for Enhancing Resilience and Catastrophe Modeling (CERCat), bringing together researchers, industry leaders, and public-sector innovators to advance the science of catastrophe modeling and improve how communities prepare for and respond to disasters.
By uniting academic research with industry and government expertise, the consortium aims to strengthen catastrophe modeling tools and translate new insights into practical solutions that support disaster resilience.
“Catastrophe modeling is at the heart of ensuring safer, more resilient communities,” says Jamie Padgett, CERCat deputy director and professor and chair of civil and environmental engineering at Rice. “CERCat provides a much-needed bridge between academia and industry stakeholders in the broader risk, resilience, and cat modeling space. By combining the intellectual capital of our universities with the expertise of industry and government, we can advance the field and deliver insights that directly benefit industry and society.”
CERCat held its inaugural industry advisory board meeting in August 2025 with representatives from member companies. The board—drawn from insurance and reinsurance firms, catastrophe modeling vendors, and engineering and consulting companies—will help shape the consortium’s research agenda.
Early projects prioritized by the board focus on developing tools that either do not exist or fall short of current needs. One effort centers on multihazard fragility curves that model how buildings perform under overlapping threats such as hail and wind, capturing compounding effects that better reflect real-world risk than traditional single-hazard approaches do.
The consortium is also creating the wildfire fragility curves for residential buildings using past event data to fill a major gap in risk modeling. Similarly, a project to link climate variability to localized tropical cyclone hazards will provide community-level insights, moving beyond the broad, coarse models available today.
Additional priorities include using artificial intelligence and remote sensing to accelerate post-disaster damage assessment, replacing slow, manual methods with faster, more accurate tools. Researchers will also work to improve modeling of the joint probability of hazards during hurricanes by moving beyond stationary assumptions and accounting for a changing climate.
“This consortium is not just about advancing models—it’s about advancing their practical applications,” said Paolo Bocchini, CERCat director and a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Lehigh. “Our work has the potential to improve everything from insurance frameworks to building codes to how communities plan for recovery. The insights we generate here will translate into better risk communication, safer infrastructure, more efficient disaster response and more resilient economies.”
CERCat brings together 18 interdisciplinary faculty experts from civil engineering, statistics, Earth sciences, mathematics, computer science, social sciences, and public policy. The consortium will also engage students and postdoctoral researchers to foster the next generation of leaders in risk and resilience.
Collaborating institutions include Columbia University, Florida Atlantic University, Missouri University of Science and Technology and Washington State University, expanding the reach and impact of the consortium’s work.